Marquette Building on First-Year Buzz

With all the buzz around first-year programs, it's the early years after the inaugural attention that a team like Marquette can go overlooked. After a great inaugural season, the Marquette lacrosse program is looking to build on last season’s successes.

As a first-year program, the Golden Eagles played the role of the new kid on the block. They held the element of surprise since opponents had never faced or seen the team in action, and upset Air Force and Bellarmine and went on an impressive three-game win streak.

The squad consisted of mostly freshmen combined with a few older players who were also new to Division I lacrosse. The amount of inexperience plagued the team, yet they made a statement for the future of the program. They finished the year with a 5-8 record. It was by no means enough to put them in the postseason, but it was a terrific start for the young program in Milwaukee.

“We can compete. I mean, 5-8 last year, which is good, but at the same time for a first-year program we’re competing against top teams,” sophomore attackman Conor Gately said. “We played really good teams so we didn’t compete in all the games, but we tried our best and hopefully with this year we can grow in that just make every game a close game.”

Now last year is in the past. There is a new aura around this team in the fall, and they are no longer the newcomer and will not sneak up on anyone. But there's much to look forward to heading into the spring.

All the young and inexperienced players are now veterans, so to speak. They are familiar with the system that head coach Joe Amplo put in place for them so the learning curve will be smaller and the team can jump right into preparations for the spring during this offseason.

They still need to teach the system to the 14 new players on the team, but the team is much farther along than they were at this point last year, when they had to teach the system to everyone.

“That first year it was tough to teach full team concepts because we didn’t have a full team, but last year we were pretty much teaching from top to bottom everything new,” Amplo said. “Where this year we’re just teaching everything new to 14 players and we have over 30 players who know our system, so they’re coaches on the field and they’re helping the learning curve move along a little bit quicker.”

With experience also comes more depth on the roster. Senior defender BJ Grill does not see one position that is set in stone for the spring.

“We are deeper than last year and that’s the big thing,” Grill said. “I think our talent is there I just think we’re very young still. We do have some seniors for the first time so I see areas where we need to get better and we’re going to be good and we’re going to be able to compete against a lot of teams this year compared to last year we didn’t really get to compete.”

A smaller learning curve and depth are great assets to have early during fall preparations, but the team has to wait until the spring to face an opponent.

Amplo said that since the team is so isolated from most teams, they would have to spend a lot of time traveling. Since the student-athletes cannot miss the miss class in a non-championship season, they would have to arrive, play and leave and Amplo did not see enough reason to do this.

“It just didn’t make sense to us from a travel perspective,” Amplo said. “So for us to get out east to compete, we’d had to leave late, the flight options weren’t great and we would get in so late, so it wouldn’t give us the best opportunity to be at our best the next day and we just didn’t think it was worth while from a competition standpoint.”

Not playing in the fall will make for a tougher transition into the regular season. They will have to make the most out of preseason scrimmages to get the jitters out before the start of the regular season.

Possibly the biggest challenge this year will be playing in the Big East. Marquette was an independent last season and joins the Big East alongside powerhouse Denver, who defeated the Golden Eagles last year 15-4. The conference will be arguably one of the best in lacrosse and big step for the second-year program, but it makes the team hungrier for success.

“Great teams, great coaches, I think its going to be one of those conferences that is a lot like what the Big East basketball is going to be where on any given day any team can beat each other and there’s going to be strong rivalries formed,” Amplo said.